Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz

Genre: Horror / Short Story / Monsters

Year Published: 1991

Year Read: 2016

Series: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark #3

Publisher: HarperCollins

YES!
YES! YES!

Finally, I got the chance to read the final set of
stories from Alvin Schwartz and Stephen
Gammell’s controversial yet popular series, “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” called “Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones!” In celebration
of Halloween, I have decided to revisit this little gem of a series again and I
was seriously not disappointed!

This book mostly has a set of
scary stories that will haunt you in your sleep, so here are a couple of
stories out of this collection:

Harold

The story starts off with two
guys named Thomas and Alfred who decided to make a man sized doll that looked
exactly like the farmer they hated named Harold and they decided to put the
doll outside the pasture to scare off the birds.Occasionally, Thomas and Alfred would make
fun of the Harold doll and sometimes violently hit the doll for no reason at
all.One night however, Thomas and
Alfred start to notice strange things about the Harold doll as the doll began
to make grunting noises and started moving around by itself.This starts to creep out both Alfred and
Thomas and they decided to leave the pasture to get away from Harold.But when Thomas decided to go back to the
pasture to get the milking stools…

The Red Spot

One night when Ruth was sleeping,
she noticed a spider crawling on her face and afterwards, she discovered that
she had a big red spot on her left cheek.She showed the red spot to her mother and her mother kept telling her
that the red spot will go away soon enough.But later on, the red spot got bigger and bigger and soon it began to
burst and….

Is Something Wrong?

The story started off with a man
spending the night at an empty house due to his car breaking down.As soon as the man tried to go to sleep, he
heard a loud crash and something large and heavy fell through the chimney and
went after the man.The man then started
running away from the strange creature, but when he came to the road, the
creature tapped him on the shoulder and…

Just like the previous two books
in the “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”
series, Alvin Schwartz has done an
excellent job at narrating these spooky tales that range from being deeply
disturbing (“Harold” and “Just Delicious”)
to being slightly scary but having a somewhat humorous twist towards the end (“Is Something Wrong)?I like the fact that Alvin Schwartz is able to juggle between horror and humor in this
collection as it made the stories interesting to read through (even though I have
always preferred the more straight-forward horror themed stories since I love
reading genuinely terrifying tales, especially in October)!But, probably the best part about this book
was the illustrations done by none other than Stephen Gammell!Now, while
I understand that Stephen Gammell’s
artwork was highly controversial when this series first came out, I honestly love
how horrifying these illustrations are as they make the horror aspects in each
of the stories even more effective to read through and I was seriously creeped
out by some of the illustrations!Some
of my favorite images in this book were from “Is Something Wrong?” “The Dead Hand,” “Sam’s New Pet,” and “The Red Spot!”

The reason why I took off half a
star from the rating was because the pacing in some of the stories were a bit
too slow, especially in the story “The
Trouble,” where I wished that the story would have gotten to the main point
much quicker.Also, the reason why this
book series was so controversial was due to Stephen Gammell’s frightening artwork.There are some genuinely horrifying artworks
in this book, most notably in stories like
“Sam’s New Pet,” “The Dead Hand” and “Is Something Wrong?” and some of the
artwork would feature grotesque and creepy characters and characters that are
covered in blood.Parents might want to
read this book first before showing it to their children to see if their
children can handle the scary content of this book series.

Overall, “Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones” is a truly great
finale to Alvin Schwartz and Stephen
Gammell’s legendary “Scary Stories
to Tell in the Dark” series and even though this series has come to an end,
I will probably still re read this series down the line once more!I would recommend this book to children ages
six and up since the frightening imagery and scary stories might terrify
younger children.

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Hello! I'm Ronyell and anyone who wants to be my friend is free to become friends with me! Also, I love followers on my blog, since I have so many great things to talk about the various books I read from time to time. I love to read, exercise, sleep and surf on the internet, with reading being my most favorite activity.
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